School

About 20 years later (8 Dec 2000), President Clinton happened to
visit Kearney. He arrived on Air Force One
[photo][photo][photo]
at the municipal airport, mesmerizing
the Kearneyites
[article]. Some locals
remembered the previous visits of political luminaries
[article]. Why is it that the
trappings
of the United States Presidency, including its motorcades
[photo],
White House staff, and the
United States Secret Service seem to
capture a reporter's imagination [article]
more than the President himself?

[Footnotes added 19 October 2002]
I'm told that "Air Force One" is automatically the name of any
plane carrying the current US President.
That might explain why
this smallish jet doesn't
look suitably Presidential.
Maybe a 747 is too big to land at the Kearney airport?
Celebrities arrive in Kearney by bus, also.

In 1985 I graduated from the
University of Nebraska
[website] at Lincoln (UNL),
in Lincoln, Nebraska. I majored in Mathematics after toying
with Computer Science and German a bit.

My UNL transcript [page 1][page 2]
seems to portray a very good student. I probably should have
taken more classes.

I left Nebraska in 1985, probably never to return except on visits.
But like all Nebraskans, I'll never forget
this little jingle.

In 1990 I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science
from Stanford University
[website], where
I had an office in Margaret Jacks Hall
[photo 1][photo 2].
My advisor was
Jeff Ullman [photo], who is apparently
the most cited computer scientist
[website] in the world.
I have brazenly
copied his academic family tree (as of the year 2000)
[diagram] (find me!)
over to the web site you are looking at now.

Assessment

I don't recommend my Ph.D. thesis research
[article]
as a subject
for further contemplation by anyone. Somehow
my busy Stanford schedule
[transcript]
permitted me to
to find plenty of time to post "news" articles [archive] on the su.roger-or-andy Computer Science department electronic bulletin board.

Many of these musings were
not exactly related to my thesis.

Job Hunting (1990)

So I had a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford.
Surely it was time, therefore, to look for an academic job?

I sent off some academic job applications, maybe thirty.
I came
close to getting an appointment at a couple of places, I think.
On the other hand, maybe people were just being extremely nice.

I've always enjoyed the Schadenfreude that comes
from reading about other people's failures. Here are a few
rejection letters for your reading pleasure:

I know I had a big box full of rejection
letters. Now I can't find it, just when I really want to scan
them in and put them up on this web site.
I must have hurled them all out sometime in a pique of frustration.

Putting aside my main objection, namely, that I didn't really
know how to develop software, I accepted the job. My personal
ride through the
Silicon Valley startup culture of the 1990s was about to begin.

Teknekron Software Systems

Reading my Teknekron job offer
letter dated 30 January 1991 [page 1][page 2], you'll note that it
was signed by JoMei ("JoMei the Money") Chang
[article], and calls for me to report to
her husband, Dale Skeen [Bio][Photo].
These two got sick of Teknekron
also (but several years after I did). They started Vitria
[website], which had a
typically volatile up and downhill ride in the late-1990s tech stock market
[chart]. You'll see, for example,
that a big chunk of Dale Skeen's Vitria shares fell from being worth
more than $1 billion to a mere $163 million in a few months
[table]. And by February 2003, with
most of the tech crash completed, the whole
company would be valued at less than half of that ($72 million).
Ten years earlier (early 1991), these millions had not yet been realized,
and Dale and JoMei were instead shuffling my Teknekron
interview schedule
[image].

Assessment

I hated this job, and worked at Teknekron only 16 weeks.
As an example of life's little ironies,
I've been basically doing the same thing (getting involved
in software startups) ever since. For the most part,
I've enjoyed it.

And why do I bring up these people, Dale and JoMei? For me, they represent
archetypes of the Silicon Valley software start up lifestyle as is
was led in the decade of the 1990s. This lifecycle
ran through my (and many other) peoples careers
in the 1990s. The basic form seems to be

1. Join a software company.
2. Realize that you don't like it, or don't like something about it.
3. Meet some smart new people.
4. Start a new software company with the new people.
5. Piss some of the old people off, but also make some new friends.
6. Sell the new company, either in the public markets, or to another
technology company.
7. You have now joined a software company again. You're about to
realize that you don't like it, or don't like something about it.

You get the idea. We've already covered steps 1, 2, and 3. Around
step six is where you hope to get really rich
[cartoon].

PostModern Computing Technologies, Inc. (1991-1995)

Step 4: After leaving Teknekron in mid-1991
I co-founded an (ultimately successful)
computer networking software company that
we called PostModern Computing Technologies, Inc
[logo, ca 1994]. Today (early 2001) the products we originally developed
at PostModern
are still being marketed and sold by Inprise (Borland) via a chain of software
company acquisitions.

I made up the company name. A lot of people thought it was cool.
Others didn't, or were understandably neutral about
it while pronouncing it "Postmortem."
In any case, the earliest PostModern documents that I'm aware of
date from May 1991 and are in a notebook
I still possess. Page 1
had some general thoughts on the company naming
problem
[image],
but not until page 2 [image]
did "PostModern" appear. Page 3 [image]
anticipates some company and product
names that wouldn't be created until the Internet explosion in 1995,
before getting a bit silly at the end.

My PostModern Computing co-founder was Jens
Christensen
[Bio][Photo]
whom I knew from the Stanford
Computer Science Ph.D. program. He also had worked at
Teknekron. Our first "place of business" was Jens's house
on Church street in Mountain View
[business card].
We recruited Prasad Mokkapati, rented
a 500 square foot office at 1032 Elwell Court in Palo Alto, and printed
up a brochure
[front][back].
Later we would need
a larger office at 1897 Landings Drive in Mountain View
[business card],
one town south of Palo Alto on the Silicon Valley peninsula.

From a PostModern business plan dated 28 October 1994:

"PostModern has developed a suite of three products addressing the
needs of companies developing complex distributed applications
to be deployed on large networks. All three products are currently
shipping and have an existing customer base..."

It wasn't apparent to us at that time that the most important of
these "large networks" would be the Internet itself.
Anyway: what were these products?

The first commercial C++ class library toolkit for TCP/IP
networking that I'm aware
of, which we called NetClasses:

PostModern was a non-venture-backed high tech start up.
Its "rounds of investment" were realized from the time and effort
of the founders and employees, not from the cash that someone else happened
to throw our way. We did put a small amount of
money (probably less than $15,000 apiece) into the business ourselves
to buy computers and pay rent.

I think it may be that role that venture capital (VC) plays in
creating successful technology companies is overrated.
If you're thinking
about starting a high tech company, and particularly
if you've never done it before, my advice is to just do it.
In particular, forget about trying to persuade VC that you have a
good idea, and just dive in.
You'll learn a lot more by just trying and may end up
being forced to create a successful (ie profitable) company!

Here's what the Profit & Loss picture looked like for PostModern
Computing in 1993
[image].

Step 5 (pissing people off): Dale and JoMei reappear briefly,
while they were still at Teknekron,
threatening to serve a trade secret theft lawsuit on
PostModern and its founders
[meeting notes]. In fact,
it emerged near the end of this meeting that
their main desire was to block our efforts to sell our products
to one of Teknekron's prospective customers (Micron Technology).
We were (sadly) intimidated by these threats. We decided to
call Micron and tell
them we wanted to stop negotiating with them. Micron found out about
the Teknekron strong-arm tactics and dropped Teknekron as a
potential vendor too. We (PostModern) never heard from Teknekron again.

Assessment

I left PostModern in early 1995. The company went on just as well (better?)
without me to the next step, ie, Step 6 (sell the company). The acquisition
[10-K filing extract]
of PostModern by Visigenic Software took place in 1997.
Visigenic is now part of Inprise (which was Borland). I've copied over
an Inprise SEC 10-K filing if you really want to read about
these events and technologies in detail [filing].

In retrospect, this star probably burned brightest
in 1996 and 1997, when many people thought
that the "next generation" of Internet applications would be
based on a CORBA-like RPC model and Java.
Technical books teaching
developers how to use the PostModern (then Visigenic) products
came out about this time, selling the vision
[book 1][book 2].

Things haven't quite worked out that way. Today, many
web applications being deployed perfectly well without relying on
a client- or server-side CORBA runtime.
However, these C++ and Java products, which originated at PostModern, are
still being moved forward and
marketed today (early 2001) by Inprise under the name
Visibroker:

None of the original PostModern company founders were with
Inprise one year after the acquisition of Visigenic by Inprise.
They all went on to
start other companies, although
not always successfully.

That's rightwe've
arrived at Step 7.

If you've liked reading this stuff about wrenching transitions from
graduate school to software startups, PostModern Computing, Teknekron,
trade secret lawsuits, and investor returns,
here [article (pdf)] is
another amusing article I wrote about these experiences.
It stars Ann Winblad [photo][bio][website] as the
Doubting
Venture Capitalist, Norm Siegler as the Corporate Hitman, and
Jens Christensen's wife Neguine Navab
[bio][photo] in the role of
Lady Macbeth.

Consulting Gigs (1995-1997)

After leaving PostModern, I became a software consultant.

Consulting is not a bad job in Silicon Valley. You appear,
work a bit, then vanishsometimes to reappear again. Or,
if you like the work, the client may try to persuade you to take a job
as a full-time employee. I tried to avoid that.

There was always plenty of work.
Here are two stops along the way.

Talarian

Talarian
[website] had its offices in
Mt. View not far from PostModern, and was in basically in the same
business as PostModern. So I was a natural fit there. Their
phone list from 1995
[image] gives an
idea of how a small Silicon Valley software company was organized
just prior to the Internet explosion. No "web developers" here.

In one letter [image]
to the person who introduced me to Talarian,
I fell naturally into the conspiratorial tone of the consultant
in suggesting potential strategies.

Talarian did an IPO in July 2000 but got beaten up along with everyone else
in the unforgiving
stock market later that year
[chart].

In the summer of 1997, Anil Gangollione of my officemates
from the Stanford Computer Science departmenttold me that
he had incorporated himself as a (one man) Internet security
consulting company. He named the corporation Structured Arts
[web page (1997)].

Greg Whitehead and I invested $10,000 apiece in this corporation in
October 1997, joining Anil in the original Structured Arts office
at 20111 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 145, in Cupertino, California.
We set out to develop Internet security software products. We
did some consulting to pay the bills.

In a small, consulting-funded start-up, it's sometimes useful to have
multiple business cards. Depending upon whether you want to
seem important [card 1] or get some
consulting work [card 2], you pick
the appropriate card.

This proved to be a very successful investment of time and money.
Structured Arts was acquired
[web site archive]
by Signio
[office photos],
an Internet payments company, about two years later.

We packed up the Structured Arts stuff, took it over to the
(much nicer) Signio offices in Redwood Shores, and started
working there. It was early September 1999.

We had hardly settled into our cubicles at Signio when
VeriSign acquired Signio
[article][press release]
at a valuation [tombstone]
well in line
with the absurdly high Internet valuations of the time.

VeriSign's purchase of Signio was announced on 21 December 1999.
Although no one knew it at the timeat least I didn't know it,
and no one around me seemed to know itthe Internet stock bubble was
about to pop.
Still, on 21 December 1999, the VeriSign
stock price was "only" $150 per share. It would go up another $100
in the next 10 weeks. And I couldn't sell any shares because the transaction
hadn't yet "closed."

I was very lucky to receive (and sell!) VeriSign shares on the exact day
VeriSign achieved its all-time high stock price, in early March 2000
[chart].
The great tech stock crash would start only ten days later, on 10 March 2000.

Exactly three years later (10 March 2003), here's what the San Jose
Mercury News had to say
[article].

But in early March 2000, I remember
wondering whether it wasn't a huge mistake to be selling VeriSign stock. I had
heard an influential stock analyst say "VeriSignthat's a four
hundred dollar stock" when it closed up at $240/share only a few days earlier.
VeriSign closed at $7.43 on 10 March 2003.

Note added 25 February 2006: And I should have bought somenow VeriSign is at $24.59.

Michael Graves, the Signio CTO
[photo (on left), with
Greg Whitehead (on right)], deserves a lot of the
credit both for bringing together Signio and Structured Arts,
and for helping Philippe Courtot, the Signio CEO, sell Signio to VeriSign.
He was later nearly killed in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World
Trade Center
[his story, PDF].

VeriSign (2000-2001)

These acquisitions left me as an employee and shareholder
of VeriSign [business card]. I worked
there for two more years [office building photo]
before "quasi-retiring"
on 10 August 2001. I still consult for technology
companies and venture capitalists from time to time.

Here [Photo 1]
I'm giving a talk about VeriSign technology in Tokyo,
and later [Photo 2] I'm answering a
question.
These photos were taken just a few weeks before I left VeriSign, in July
2001. The cord dangling from my ear is connected to
a simultaneous translation
earpiece. I had spent a few moments trying to attach it to my
tie (I thought it was a microphone) while my Japanese audience waited
patiently. Quentin Gallivan (the Vice President of VeriSign sales)
came to my rescue and told me "it goes in your ear."

[Note added 19 Feb 2003]
The tech stock crash of 2000-2002 led to some huge accounting writedowns.
VeriSign is number 6 on
this list.

Brush with Greatness

On a 20 September 2000 business trip while working for VeriSign,
I arrived at the Westin Fairfax
(previously the Ritz Carlton)
hotel in Washington DC. I went to the bar for a drink.
There were only about 4 people in the bar until lots
of famous people started showing up. Here are the notes
I kept at the bar as people arrived [image].
Later, someone in their party told me they were there after having
given performances at the Kennedy Center (something for Human Rights).

Beyond (2001-?)

In 2001, Gloria and I established a Foundation
[UNK Story]
in honor of my parents' service
to the University of Nebraska at Kearney
[UNK web archive].

[Note added Jan 2003]: I've been working on
misère octal games.
In December 2002, my work
was mentioned in the American Mathematical Society's
"New In Math" section (see page 4, in the section "Solving Nim").
Too bad they didn't put my picture on the front page with von Neumann,
Nash, and Conway. If only I were just another "John"...

[Note added March 2003]: Recently the foundation bought
an English horn that was played
in a 4 March 2003 concert in the
refurbished Central Elementary School
[image]
auditorium in Kearney, Nebraska. Back in 1967, I was a first grader
in the same
building. I remember thinking the auditorium was dark and scary.
About the same year, I noticed a time capsule
that had been recently buried on the
Central Elementary school
grounds. Someone had written the date it was to be opened
by writing in
the cement that covered it. I remember thinking, "that date is so
far in the future that that thing will never be opened." The
date was sometime in 1976. To my youthful perspective it might as well have
said, "to be opened in the year 203,566."

[Note added September 2003]: I wrote a huge paper on misère games,
Pretending in Misère Combinatorial Games (PDF).
The responsible thing to do would be to publish it somewhere, but I'm too lazy. People who are interested
in the subject matter seem to find it easily enough via web searches, anyway. And by not publishing,
I can always add to it later.

[Note added January 2004]: I've put the misere games aside for awhile. Now I'm
trying to learn Physics. As usual, I've produced big,
quite possibly useless documents as a side effect.

[Note added December 2004]: On 15 August 2004, standing in our kitchen cleaning carrots, I
suddenly realized how to solve the misere game problem that was troubling me in 2002 and 2003. So I wrote a paper about it and sent it a journal called INTEGERS. I'm glad I didn't submit the "Pretending" paper that I wrote in 2003. It looks dumb in retrospect, now that I've arrived in the promised land.

[Note added December 2006]: There have been many new developments in the misere game theory, which is working out to be even more fascinating than it appeared in 2004. Over in Berkeley, people have even been writing plays inspired by combinatorial game theory. And I've found a most excellent collaborator in Aaron Siegel, a student of Elwyn Berlekamp who is now doing a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Most of the recent developments are described at miseregames.org. I still feel the vague need to find something
new to work onmaybe I'll go back to learning physics?

[Note added 15 March 2011]: Michael Sammons asked why I haven't updated this page recently: "Maybe your significant other hasn't let you on the computer since December of 2006? Or you sprained your wrist in November of 06? Or your dog ate it?"

Well, it's just my usual lassitude, I guess:

Tiberius has no history during those years, for he had nothing to do. He walked and talked with his astrologer, Thrasyllus, and with other guests, servants, and clients of his estate. He read Greek poetry, Egyptian pornography, histories of warfare, and treatises on science. He bathed, dined, and grew older.

(Encyclopedia Britannica, "Tiberius").

But since someone's reading this page (or at least Michael has, even today), let's have a look over the last few years and its assorted Egyptian pornography:

In 2007 I joined up with Aaron Siegel and my long-time business partner Greg Whitehead to form yet another little California S-corporation. We named it counterwave.
In 2008 we counterwavers collaborated with Elwyn Berlekamp and Eddie Raha to start a hedge fund named Berkeley Quantitative. In 2009 Greg and I withdrew from the hedge fund
and threw back in with Counterwave full-time, where we do some consulting and have recently been writing applications for the iPhone and iPad, for example doceri and
notakto.

I've also been involved quite a bit with the Gathering 4 Gardner, a non-profit organization whose
mission statement and overview page I ghostwrote with help from Tom Rodgers and Scott Hudson:

The Gathering for Gardner Foundation (G4G) is a non-profit corporation that works to honor the achievements of Martin Gardner by promoting the lucid exposition of new and accessible ideas in recreational mathematics, magic, puzzles, and philosophy.

My involvement with this organization has put me in touch with lots of magicians, mathematicians, and puzzle people. You know who you are. The card is up your sleeve. I know.

What else can I think of? I got to know my next door neighbor, the Stanford physicist and string-theorist Leonard Susskind, a bit better. We carpooled to his evening Continuing Studies lectures on Physics at Stanford University.
My older son, Cole, became an All-American springboard and platform diver as a Freshman at Palo Alto high school. My younger son Owen got thirty five hits and played catcher on Old Pro, the 2010 Palo Alto Little League champion team, managed by Kevin Cool.

This is beginning to sound like a Christmas letter. And I'm just about falling asleep as I type it, it's so boring. But thanks for reading it.

At Flickr, I wrote an even more uninformative page about myself. Perhaps you'd like to take a look at that.